"Colonial and Post-Colonial Goan Literature in Portuguese: Woven Palms" [reviewed] in SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 42.3 (2021)

As Paul Melo e Castro notes in the introduction, this edited volume takes Goa to be “a product of manifold influences … from both East and West and a global history connected to … the Indian Ocean and beyond” (1-2). Attentive to these confluences, contributors to this book explore Goan literature in Portuguese as the expression and making of Goan identity over the period of Portuguese colonialism and its afterlife in Goa. The primary focus of this volume is literature produced by Goans – both in the colony and the metropole – in the last centuries of Portuguese rule in Goa. Goan literary production in Portuguese tapered off after 1961, the year in which Goa was annexed by the Indian union, ending 451 years of Portuguese colonialism in South Asia. In part, the occlusion of Portuguese in post-annexation Goa occurred due to the region’s “traditions and institutions … [being] largely overlaid and displaced by those of [formerly] British India” (3), bearing witness to the limits of Indian decoloniality. While the book is a formalistic and critical study of literature, its contributors additionally “provide a discontinuous cartography of Goan attitudes to colonial rule and the possibility of escaping its bounds, [as well as] European intellectual currents and changing autochthonous traditions” as encompassed in the written word (4). This underscores the importance of studying Goan writing in Portuguese as a form of South Asian cultural production (by those of such origin who employ(ed) literature to limn the particularities of their homeland) even as that very language places Goa within a pluricontinental Lusophonic network. Accordingly, the book would be of use to postcolonialists and sociologists, scholars of European and Asian literatures and linguistics, and historians of South Asia and Iberia.

In the introduction, and along with Hélder Garmes in a second essay, Melo e Castro makes the case for
redefining Indo-Portuguese literature as Goan Literature in Portuguese, an important consideration of terminology that then allows the region’s canon to be seen as its own autonomous creation. Even as Portuguese colonialism may have given Goan writers its tongue, literature by the Catholic elite – but not exclusively – spoke to local concerns having to do with struggles between South Asian and European world views, caste, religion, internecine conflicts, and other local concerns that stood alongside and sometimes intersected with colonialism. Such specificities at once separated these works from the literature of the Portuguese metropole and, even as they were produced against a colonial backdrop, at times were unrelated to Portuguese colonialism itself. Coincidentally, a subtle strand of analysis in this collection chronicles how the literary works evidence transcolonial linkages across the Lusophone world or between British and Portuguese post/colonialities. Goan literature in Portuguese as a field of study thereby is part of a distinct constellation of worldwide literatures in Portuguese while still being germane to its own regional contexts.

The publication of feuilletons that were borne of, and which evinced, local circumstance further proves the autonomy of the Goan literary scene from its metropolitan counterpart despite the shared use of Portuguese. By the nineteenth century, Goan journalism became a font of literary production that centered on identity-making. Sandra Atáide Lobo takes up the episodic writing of Francisco João da Costa, who published fiction in the local press under the pseudonym GIP. A satirist whose short fiction lampooned how local elites uncritically copied the extravagant habits of the Portuguese, Lobo believes that da Costa’s ultimate purpose for such disparagement was to correct the upper echelon for they could be viewed poorly by (and were setting a bad example for) the rest of Goan society. In contrast, Luís Pedroso de Lima Cabral de Oliveira focuses on how José da Silva Coelho’s law-themed fiction in the press highlights the struggles of non-elite Goans who tried to ascend the social ladder by becoming lawyers. Revealing the restrictions of class and caste in colonial Goa, de Oliveira also uses da Silva Coelho’s writing to show how the under-resourced Portuguese empire deputized inadequately trained local talent to run its provincial affairs. Accordingly, this volume crosses disciplines in demonstrating how literary studies may also apply to other fields like colonial law and sociology.

What may also be made of these Goan literary developments, and the provincial matters they ensconced,
is that they ran parallel with the centrifugal nature of later periods of the Portuguese empire which in its multicontinental fragmentation could not sustain a transcolonial canon of literature even as its numerous literatures were written in the common lingua of the empire. Identifying an effort by the declining Portuguese colonial state to belatedly create a genre titled literatura ultramarine, or the literature of Portugal’s Overseas Provinces, Duarte Drumond Braga reads the oeuvre of once-Portuguese resident Goan multi-genre writer Vimala Devi as evading such attempts. Braga contends that “in claiming a ‘spiritual’, literary and cultural autonomy for Goa,” Devi “[valorizes] … an Indo-Portuguese Goa, albeit not a colonial one” (125-126). Published in Portugal in the aftermath of the Indian annexation of Goa which signaled the demise of the Lusitan empire, Braga regards Devi’s poetry collection Súria (1962) as “a work of exile and an elegy for Goa” that is not devoid of exoticism for “Western consumption” (133). Such awareness notwithstanding, neither Braga nor Cielo G. Festino, who writes about Devi’s short story collection Monção (1963), adequately delve into the question of why Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida, an upper caste Catholic, would give herself the obviously Indic Hindu pseudonym associated with her life’s work. The curiousness of such high caste self-identification would seem to require enquiry given Festino’s honing in on Monção’s representation of the plight of lower caste people in Goa’s feudal agricultural system. 

As forewarned by its title, caste is a major preoccupation of the first Goan novel in Portuguese, Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luis Gomes. A parliamentarian who represented his native Goa in Portugal, Gomes’ novel is not about Goa. Writing about the novel and its allegorical critique of colonialism in nearby British India (meant to serve as a cautionary tale to the Portuguese), Everton Machado argues that Gomes’ disavowal of colonialism is of that of the British variety, his preference being for the Portuguese version and its championing of equality through Catholicism. Deriving from the laws that gave Goans the same citizenship rights as Portuguese metropolitans – something that was not true for British subjects – Gomes’ position, Machado avers, is an overstatement of the enlightened nature of Portuguese colonialism. Nevertheless, Machado holds that Gomes’ self-identification as a Portuguese person – paralleled by his South Asian characters’ embracing of Christianity – is to only be seen as the “wear[ing] of a ‘white mask’” (50). Here, Machado’s view contravenes the ethos of this volume which draws out multiple yet contradictory aspects of Goan writing in Portuguese (the language) even as it is not Portuguese (the identity of the metropolitan center). Coincidentally, the inherent making of Portuguese identities in a disjointed empire cannot simply be understood as having a single geographic origin nor existing in their multiplicity only as imitation.

Other essays in the book provide broad overviews, as with David K. Jackson’s survey of Goa-related
poetry in Portuguese, while Edith Noronha Melo Furtado inspects women’s writing from the territory in relation to patriarchy. Joana Passos likewise considers gender in her comparative analysis of poetry by Devi in Portuguese and Eunice de Souza in English. Yet, the calling out of gender in these specific contributions about women’s writing sets in relief the lacking intersectional analysis in many of the other essays. For example, M. Filomena de Brito Gomes Rodrigues might have attended to Orlando da Costa’s Sem Flores Nem Coroas (1971) not only as a critique of nationalist patriarchy but also in how it parallels the suppression of women in the domestic sphere of the play. This essay also troublingly states that upon arrival in Goa, the Portuguese found societies that were “more developed than … in Africa” (200). Unlike Rodrigues, Eufemiano Miranda and Melo e Castro successfully spotlight the intersections of gender, caste, religious difference, and regionality in Agostinho Fernandes’ Bodki (1962). Another observation is that, throughout the volume, the unfortunate characterization of women as having “fallen pregnant” makes it sound like they have suffered an affliction.  

While Melo e Castro finds that the discontinuation of the widespread use of Portuguese in Goa has led to literature in that language being understudied, the editor equally calls for scholarly efforts that situate themselves within an ecosystem of Goan literature that includes the Lusophonic as well as the region’s “other major bodies of writing in Konkani, Marathi and English” (5). Funded by the Brazilian project “Pensando Goa” (Thinking Goa), one wonders how this volume and others supported by this scheme might have reached these very goals had they included editors of Goan origin. Inasmuch as the volume under discussion makes the study of Goan writing in Portuguese available to readers in English, thereby expanding the reach of South Asian Lusophonic studies, as Melo e Castro suggests, Lusophone scholars would gain much from post/colonial studies of Goa’s multilingual literary traditions.

 

 

 

From South Asian Review.

"40 Years after AIDS, Remembering Dominic D'Souza" in SCROLL (27 May 2021)

June 2021 will mark the 40^th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, a sobering reality in the face of the current Coronavirus pandemic. While the Indian variant of COVID-19 continues to take its toll in a deadly second wave, Goa has presently recorded the highest rate of infections in India despite being its smallest state. This dubious distinction (the reasons for which have much to do with the tourism-dependent state not going into lockdown earlier than it did this month) sits alongside another virus-related history-making association with Goa. The 27^th of May marks the death anniversary of Dominic D’Souza from AIDS-related causes in 1992 soon after being diagnosed, in Goa, as the first person in India to have become infected with HIV.

Much of what has been written about D’Souza’s diagnosis has veered towards the sensational, obscuring his life’s work as an AIDS activist. Take this newspaper account from 2017 on the 25^th anniversary of his death:

On 14 February 1989, D’Souza … was summoned [by the] … police… [H]e was handcuffed and taken to Asilo Hospital in Mapusa, where doctors gathered around him. They didn’t touch him but asked him several questions: Did he have sex with prostitutes, was he a homosexual, did he inject drugs? It was only when he saw a nurse pass by holding a file with the words “AIDS” printed on its cover that D’Souza realized that he was HIV-positive.

If this recounting of events appears cinematic, consider that the report also highlights a commemorative event that was held in Bombay to mark D’Souza’s death anniversary, one that included the screening of the 2005 film My Brother… Nikhil (MBN). The gay-themed film, directed by the mononymous Onir, fictionalizes the events of D’Souza’s life and death as the first person in India found to be HIV-positive, yet contains no allusion to the inspiration it drew from the activist’s life.

Writing in 2017 about the genesis of his film, Onir reminisces:

And how can the stigma go? Through understanding…no other way. Maybe cinema helps. As for My Brother Nikhil [sic] (my 2005 film on the life of D’Souza), it’s more the case that the subject found me instead of the other way around. I was hosting a documentary talk show … when I came across D’Souza’s story. It was so powerful that it lingered and I couldn’t shake it off. I had been working on another script, which was supposed to be my first film, but I was now consumed by the urge to make this movie.

For Onir, D’Souza was never more than someone to fictionalize in a film. Onir admits as much in the afterword to the 2011 published version of his screenplay: “I remembered having edited some documentary material on Dominique De Souza [sic] … But I did not want to tell Dominique’s [sic] story. Nikhil was born out of Dominique [sic] but ultimately became a different person.”

Not only does Onir get D’Souza’s name wrong here, but that name is altogether absent in the film’s credits. If D’Souza’s story was so inspirational to Onir, what is to be made of this remarkable elision? Ultimately, the film plays as an act of co-option through the omission of D’Souza’s name for the purpose of foregrounding, essentially, a gay-themed story that is exclusive of D’Souza. 

Because MBN’s narrative is built upon the history of a real person, it takes the form of a biopic, but even as biopics are expected to be fictionalizations of reality, artifice exceeds the truth in Onir’s retelling by never acknowledging the person the film is ostensibly about within the filmic vehicle itself. The genre of the biopic is used in the case of MBN to disappear the real, for its investment is not in telling D’Souza’s history as something that actually happened. Rather, MBN takes D’Souza’s story and accords it other meanings—it shifts the semiotics of HIV-infection from the real-life person’s struggle to the struggles of being gay and Indian. It is then only fitting that D’Souza’s name is never to be seen anywhere in the film.

Undoubtedly, Onir’s choice to transform D’Souza’s story for the express purpose of making a statement about gay discrimination arises from the lacuna around D’Souza’s sexuality—an absence the film must obscure while using his story to tell a tale about a specific kind of sexuality. D’Souza’s sexuality has often been the subject of speculation, conjecture readily giving way to the assuredness of the activist’s queerness.

A case in point is Benjamin Law’s 2014 reportage of his conversation with Anand Grover, the lawyer who took up D’Souza’s discrimination case:

Anand had worked extensively in cases relating to homosexuality and HIV since the late 1980s, when he represented Dominic D’Souza, a gay man who was fired after being diagnosed as HIV-positive … After D’Souza died, Anand became obsessed. Gay men approached him for representation if they were being blackmailed.

Though Grover is Law’s source of information about D’Souza, Law does not say that it was the lawyer who told him of D’Souza’s sexuality; this void around Law’s source of information raises questions about its credibility. 

For Law, it is sufficient that Grover took on cases of homosexual- and HIV-discrimination to then decide that these two requirements are synonymous and proof of D’Souza’s sexuality. Law’s book is titled Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East, a tongue-in-cheek choice of name. An Australian of Asian origin, Law’s book is an attempt to understand gay sexuality in Asia, with Law himself serving as a cultural informant between West and East. “Research” of this nature continues to demonstrate how fact and fiction dissolve into one another so glibly when it comes to the matter of D’Souza’s life.

The popularization of D’Souza’s story is not solely the territory of Onir’s film, as far as fictionalizations go. When a character in The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi 2009 novel, discovers he has been infected with the HIV virus, he laments to his boyfriend: “Do you know how they treat people like me? A guy in Goa was locked up in a sanatorium when they found out he had it.” Apparently calling upon the stigma attached to being HIV-positive in India, the character’s allusion is an obvious reference to what happened to D’Souza. Shanghvi’s novel, like Onir’s film, abstracts D’Souza’s life to emotionally attach the trauma of HIV-infection to the plight of gay men. In both cases, the invisibilization of D’Souza still relies on the notoriety of the real-life events and the plausibility of HIV-infection due to homosexuality.

That Onir chose D’Souza’s story as the vehicle through which to raise awareness about the plight of middle-class gay men in India springs from the convenient linkages the director makes between what happened to D’Souza and HIV/AIDS-discrimination generally, these matters slipping into one another because of their possible association with sexuality. If for these reasons, then, it is immaterial if D’Souza was gay, for his story is meant to serve the greater good required of it by the director as self-positioned gay rights advocate.

In this vein, the film’s purposeful deployment of D’Souza’s story is about cleaving AIDS-activism from gay rights-activism, despite the relationship between the two. This is equally a historical distortion of D’Souza’s own labours as an advocate for the rights of those with HIV/AIDS; his Positive People, which MBN itself references (renaming it People Positive) is an NGO that serves anyone with the disease, regardless of sexuality. As a figure whose struggles as India’s Patient Zero, in the era of the global recognition of the AIDS crisis, were nationally known, D’Souza’s life lends itself to the cinematic as being the story of an individual who courageously fought a legal battle against discrimination. It is this individuality that MBN borrows and transforms. 

In Onir’s film, the political implications of the protagonist Nikhil’s HIV-diagnosis develops as MBN progresses. Prior to this, as the title itself suggests, MBN occupies itself in presenting an intimate portrait of a brother, but also a son and lover through the personal reminisces offered by the main character’s inner circle. That this young man who loves his family and is a source of pride to them must deal with later disapprobation is what operationalizes the intimacy the film develops, connecting it with the film’s political agenda.

In the sharing of the personal through the narration of the film by Nikhil’s intimates, MBN offers its audience a central character who could very much be like them in his commonplace attachment to loved ones. Consequently, this expands the potential of MBN beyond being a film only about gay issues; it is then also positioned as a film meant for more than an exclusively gay audience, even as its motivation is to champion gay rights. 

That an otherwise ordinary person could face discrimination because of a health problem, makes Nikhil’s struggle, in MBN, the stuff of quotidian existence; that, like D’Souza, Nikhil decides to turn a personal struggle into an opportunity for advocacy then elevates the personal, and intimate, into the political. By conferring upon Nikhil’s journey from ordinary citizen to public advocate the storyline of the genesis of HIV/AIDS in India, as well as the attendant issue of gay rights that MBN develops by borrowing from D’Souza’s AIDS-activism, the personal is not only made public but also heroic. Yet, while creating a cinematic and tragic hero in Nikhil for the cause of gay rights, D’Souza’s story as an early pioneer of AIDS-activism in South Asia is cleaved from the very film it inspired.

Even though it borrows the contexts and settings of D’Souza’s Goa to create itself, MBN makes Nikhil and his family – the Kapoors – ethnically part-North Indian, so that they appear more Indian than had they been distinctly Goan. Part of how MBN eclipses D’Souza’s story is also then in its misrepresentation of his ethnic background, and the obscuring of the Catholic cultural background of his family, in order to create a cognizably Indian filmic milieu for the consumption of a Hindi-speaking national audience.

Because the Kapoors must be identifiably Indian, the fact that the D’Souzas had spent a significant amount of time in East Africa is something the film would have no room for. The D’Souzas’ East African past is no anomaly given the history of Goan travel and residence in that part of the world from colonial times. Were the film to acknowledge such circuits of Goan identity as they are informed by the extra-national existences of Goans might have perhaps allowed it to gesture at shared postcolonial legacies and the still looming crisis of AIDS in the developing world. Re-centring D’Souza’s Goanness may allow for a rethinking of the possibility of decolonial queer activism in South Asia, for it is precisely the far more complex reality of the figure of D’Souza, which MBN leaves out, that may present a queer politics of affiliation unbeholden to the concept of nation and nationalism.

While My Brother… Nikhil uses the form of the biopic to represent the HIV/AIDS-stigmatization of gay middle-class men in an Indian setting, the film would not have been more judicious in actually being a biopic about Dominic D’Souza. The same is also true of any claim that could be made to the veracity of D’Souza’s sexuality, for a film about HIV/AIDS could also be about gay identity. D’Souza’s legacy continues to exist despite its misrepresentations in Onir’s film, so there is little that a possibly more “authentic” biopic could offer. Instead, the larger question to be grappled with is how the politics of advocacy, even in the representation of the marginal, can be manipulated cinematically. That cinematic representations of such nature limit the potential of AIDS-activism, and especially in how its advocates could be remembered and their legacies deployed, is worth more complex consideration for their political possibilities.

Certainly, D’Souza’s legacy far outstrips the treatment it receives in Onir’s film. Grover’s defence of D’Souza, when he battled the discrimination he faced for being HIV positive, in turn led to the lawyer drafting an HIV/AIDS Bill that was passed in April 2017. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Prevention and Control) Act, 2017 thus became the first national HIV law in South Asia that could potentially protect HIV-positive people against discrimination. The afterlife of D’Souza’s activism therefore persists, a legacy that continues to be of importance 40 years into the challenge of HIV/AIDS. 

From Scroll.

Adapted, with permission, from “Twenty-five Years after Dominic D’Souza: What happens when your Queer Icon Refuses to Be?” by R. Benedito Ferrão, pp. 61-83, in Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective, ed. Ahonaa Roy (Routledge 2021).